We have asked Tim Tangherlini to lead off. Tim has written his own great book, appropriately entitled Talking Trauma (University of Mississippi Press, 1998) and he will no doubt have valuable perspectives on these pieces.]]>Thu, 5 Jul 2012 16:23:14 GMThttp://www.afsnet.org/forums/posts.asp?topic=442427
http://www.afsnet.org/forums/posts.asp?topic=442427Trauma—or more accurately, traumatic experience—often
becomes part and parcel of an individual’s presentation of self and their
interpretation of their surroundings. Tradition offers a deep reservoir of
culturally meaningful expressive forms that allow individuals a means to
explore these experiences and to share them with others in ways that are
constructive both for the individual and the cultural group. Lindahl’s
exploration of the storytelling of Katrina survivors provides an important view
into the conflicting processes of storytelling, from that of the media to that
of what Lindahl labels "outsiders”, and "survivors.” While one might quibble
with his characterizations of legend, rumor and personal experience narrative,
the materials that have been assembled in the database—an impressive effort
mobilizing folklorists and community members alike—represent a very important
collection of accounts of experiences during and in the aftermath of Katrina.
The database represents a new direction in folklore research, where stories of
recent events, collected from very large numbers of people, relating to a
single episode (or series of episodes), are made readily accessible to a broad
group of researchers—computational methods that help discover latent patterns in
the underlying data (an approach that Lindahl implements in a preliminary
fashion largely through keyword searches) may help develop our understanding of
storytelling and Katrina. One can only imagine the proliferation of these types
of databases in the context of other traumatic and media-mediated events such
as the "Arab Spring,” the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the tsunami of
South East Asia, the Iranian uprisings, and the Holocaust (see the Shoah
Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive http://vhaonline.usc.edu/), along with more
sophisticated techniques (see http://bit.ly/LJMkVH) that can assist with
this type of analysis of "big data” collections. The constructed nature
of media-mediated experiences comes through in the study by Duff, Page and
Young of forwarded emails concerning negative images of President Obama. As
they note, this type of electronically mediated community making can give voice
to an experience of shared anger and worry—in this case, a fear that Obama’s
presidency threatens "true America.” In Liu’s article, narrative
traumatic experiences emerges in the dialogic performance of bridal lament—an
intriguing parallel to the dialogic fieldwork collection methods presented in
Lindahl’s piece. Indeed, the performance of kuge described by Liu
recapitulates many of the categories discovered by Lindahl and his group in the
narratives of personal trauma collected in the aftermath of Katrina. There is a
lot to discuss here—from methods for collecting personal experience narratives
regarding traumatic experiences to data storage methods and the ethical
dimensions related to such collections, from the role that narrative plays in
organizing, evaluating and aligning experience with ideology, to the role that
tradition plays as a deep cultural resource, from the role that the media plays
in imposing and interrupting local narrative, to the role that personal
narrative can play in challenging the power structures in which our lives are
necessarily embedded. Have at it.
]]>Thu, 5 Jul 2012 16:25:06 GMTTrauma Follow Uphttp://www.afsnet.org/forums/posts.asp?topic=571590
http://www.afsnet.org/forums/posts.asp?topic=571590There are several kinds of trauma that come to mind (outside the context of natural disaster) such as community violence, terrorism and battlefield-gladiator warfare. Each of these categories (or comparisons) have individual causes and identities. On the other hand, there is the broadly defined "we want our country back" movement that compares to the "we want to move our country forward" movement. The commonality I see in all the above themes a sense/feeling that society (we) (#1) are experiencing a loss of control; (#2) government is vying for more control;(#3) societal structure is deteriorating; (#4) religion is being subverted by the above turmoil. Is it coincidental/delusional that most of the above (seem to me to be) categories related to getting along with one another?]]>Thu, 2 May 2013 15:02:27 GMT